Maintaining a Healthy Cholesterol Count

Maintain a healthy cholesterol count can greatly reduce ones risk of having a potentially deadly heart attack or stroke. I bet you didn’t know that just about half of the one million people in American who had a heart attack last year died. A pretty scary number which should prompt those ignoring cholesterol to consider embarking on a program to achieve a healthy cholesterol count.

Cholesterol is a fluffy fat like substance that is produced by the liver or ingested through diet. Cholesterol is used by the body for the production of hormones and cell membranes. It is only when too much cholesterol is in our bloodstream does this essential substance turn dangerous. So what is the proper balance of cholesterol and what do I need to do to keep a healthy cholesterol count?

There are three basic cholesterol reading most doctors and patients alike keep track of: bad cholesterol (LDL), good cholesterol (HDL), and total cholesterol. Determining a healthy cholesterol count will depend on both lifestyle choices such as smoking, high saturated fat consumption, obesity, and inactivity, along with risk factors that cannot be avoided such as age, heredity, and gender.

If you have one or more of these risk factors your medical professional may suggest reducing your blood cholesterol numbers even more than normal.

If you have one or less of the risk factors listed above a healthy cholesterol count would be total cholesterol under 210; LDL cholesterol of 100 mg/dl or less; and a good cholesterol count of 50 mg/dl or more. Pretty basic stuff, right! But what if one of the numbers was out of whack. For instance what if bad cholesterol was 100 and good cholesterol was only 35. As a general rule the bad to good cholesterol ratio should never be more than 2.5 to one. Let’s take another example. What if my total cholesterol was 240 and my good cholesterol (HDL) was 40? This would be a 6 to 1 ratio and anything over about 5 to1 is considered too high.

What else? Maintaining a healthy cholesterol count, in most cases, is about changing old habits, adopting new healthier habits, and enlisting the help of convention medications such as statins or natural cholesterol reducing remedies if needed. Put simply, this basically means finding ways to increase HDL (good cholesterol) and decrease LDL (bad cholesterol levels), and bring overall cholesterol down to acceptable heart healthy levels. Certainly the aforementioned statin drugs will be one of your options but they do carry a number of serious label warnings. The side effect risks have made natural cholesterol reduction supplements combined with diet modification a safe and effective combination worth considering.

R.D. Hawkins is an enthusiastic advocate for the use of natural health products and natural living with over 10 years
experience in the field.
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